Trump really said that in June, "I'm talking about a plan with heart!"
So I was working on my weekly listen-folks-they-can't-pass-that-GOP-health-bill post when things got noisy around the old demesne and the TV went on and what do you know? I'm too late! Senators Jerry Moran (Wet-KS) and Mike Lee (Stegosaur-UT) announced that they're not voting for the bill, effectively taking it off the able and throwing it onto the compost heap, and we're now starting all over.
I've long thought this was bound to happen sooner or later, because voters all over the country are starting to realize what the Republicans have been trying to do to them, especially over the Medicaid, but McCain's health emergency seems to me to have been the immediate as opposed to proximate cause. His recovery from inside-the-skull surgery was going to delay the vote by a couple of weeks at least, likely more, which was going to allow the public to spend more time digesting the bill.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office delayed its report on the bill, which was supposed to be out on Monday, meaning they would be have time to score the unspeakable Cruz-Lee "Consumer Freedom Option", a double-whammy device to destroy the individual health insurance market in the United States, for reasons best known to Senators Cruz and Lee (they must think health insurance is immoral because it involves sharing), by dividing it into two tiers, a low-premium one that will never pay a claim for healthy people and an astronomical-premium one for those who are already sick (like Senator McCain, though of course he's old enough for Medicare if he retires and has enough money to buy a fabulous Advantage supplemental), so that only the very rich will be able to buy it at all until it dies of those death spirals we keep hearing about.
